As development of high performance, high speed integrated circuit (IC) continues, the number of semiconductor devices, and particularly active semiconductor devices such as transistors like, for example, silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) and various field-effect-transistors (FETs), being used inside a single IC continues to grow in an explosive manner. As a result, maintaining an IC chip that utilizes large number of semiconductor devices highly reliable is rapidly becoming one of the most challenging tasks during current technology development. For an IC chip involving a million or even a billion of FETs, one single failure of the FETs could, at least in theory, cause the entire chip or a system that utilizes the failed FET to fail or malfunction. On the other hand, with the continued scaling toward developing very-large-scale-integrated (VLSI) circuits, reliability margins for each individual transistors or FETs are shrinking dramatically, which further exacerbates the above reliability concern at the IC chip level.